Sam McDpwell at the Kansas City Star suddenly learns everything he can about Community Benefit Agreements (CBA) to analyze the releases by the Royals and Chiefs ahead of the April second vote. He finds them lacking:

The announcements came with summaries of “historic” future agreements, but oddly not the historic agreements themselves. And when it comes to CBAs, the experts’ first instruction is to comb through the details. Here, they ask: Where are they?

“This letter is more like a press release than anything approaching a CBA,” said Julian Gross, a lawyer in California who has taken part in more than two dozen CBA negotiations over the last quarter-century. “The whole idea is the public can access the full community benefits guarantees of a project. “So fundamentally, out of the gate, this isn’t what it purports to be — at least until they show us an agreement.”

KansasCity.com

It’s a very good primer on CBAs in general, and what works and what doesn’t.

I also wonder, with all the money the teams are committing to the community, wouldn’t it be cheaper to build the stadiums themselves? The owners often get accused of greed, but there is plenty of greed on the political side as well.